French Fried by Dolley Chris

Author:Dolley, Chris [Dolley, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: true crime
ISBN: 9781452476605
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2010-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

Crime and Poetry

It was supposed to be a routine call to Simon Gardiner, our financial adviser: a few suggestions about possible changes to our unit trusts and a couple of questions about what had happened to the promised quarterly reports. Instead it turned into one of the worst moments of my life.

Our investment bond – the bulk of the proceeds from our house sale, our life savings, the money that was going to fund our new life in France – had just disappeared.

“You cancelled it in April,” came the voice down the line.

It was now September. September 22nd. Friday. Three o’clock.

I froze. This was a piece of financial advice I had not been expecting.

“No, I didn’t,” I replied, hoping that there’d been some kind of mistake.

I could hear a riffling of papers, pages being turned, a note of panic in Simon’s voice.

“I ... er ... have the correspondence here. Yes ... April.”

I couldn’t believe it. This could not be happening. Not to me. Things like this happened to other people!

And then I thought about horseboxes and flying roofs, vignettes and roadblocks, football and flues ... and realised ... I’m just the kind of person this does happen to.

It was a shock. That sudden shift in my internal picture. I was no longer the person who sat safe and warm watching events unfold upon the television screen. I was the person in front of the camera. The man standing in the doorway as the getaway car mounts the pavement. The man eating his sandwiches in the park when the sniper opens the attic window.

They’re all me.

A voice on the line called me back. There was a chance the money hadn’t been paid over.

“There was a dispute with the insurer about the valuation of the bond and I think – yes, here it is – it’s still outstanding. And we still have the originals of the bond. I don’t think it could have been encashed without them.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No. It’s up to the insurer whether they require the originals or not. It’s unusual but...”

He didn’t have to continue. Unusual but not unknown. And with my luck...

“And even if the money hasn’t been paid out,” he continued, “all the investments would have been liquidated.”

“In April?” I asked.

“In April,” he confirmed.

Just before the stock markets took off. Just before our investment bond began the 17% rise I’d so eagerly tracked for the last six months. It had been our one success story since leaving England. My trump card whenever cars broke down, fires smoked, dogs keeled over and horses succumbed to ten-foot long caterpillars. At least our finances were booming. If we hadn’t sold the farm and come to France, we wouldn’t have benefited from the surge in the stock markets.

I should have known it was too good to be true. The only other time we’d dabbled in the stock market was a week before the 1987 crash. Would I never learn?

But how could someone get their hands on our money without us

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